We had a busy summer here at Google interacting with students through a wide variety of scholarship, internship and networking opportunities across North America. Here's a look back at a few of our programs (you can bet we'll be hosting them again!) along with news on some upcoming initiatives.

For FUSE, we welcomed 50 rising college sophomores to our New York City office for a three-day retreat designed to connect students from groups that are under-represented in the field of computer science. The retreat focused on making connections between students and Googlers, encouraging students to create meaningful academic experiences and allowing them to learn more about possible career paths via hands-on activities, panel discussions and a bit of fun around the New York City area.

Another group of twenty rising sophomores spent two weeks at the Googleplex in Mountain View for the second annual Computer Science Summer Institute. This special program included an interactive and collaborative Computer Science curriculum, as well as a living-learning residential experience for student networking. Students worked in teams to create an interactive web application using Python in Google App Engine. When not in class, they heard technical talks from Google engineers, spoke with professionals from across the technology industry and academia about the many things they can do with a Computer Science degree. They also had some fun joining the Bay Area summer interns on a boat cruise and catching a baseball game after an exciting San Francisco scavenger hunt.

In addition, our engineering internship program hosted more than 450 college (undergraduate and graduate) interns in 15 locations across North America. These interns were an integral part of the engineering team and made significant contributions this summer working on exciting projects including Android, Chrome, Docs and machine translation.

We also had more than 100 students working across multiple functions, including sales and engineering in Mountain View, New York, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Boston as part of the Building Opportunities for Leadership and Development (BOLD) Program. BOLD is a 10-week internship program designed to provide exposure to the technology industry for students from groups that are historically underrepresented in technology. This summer experience includes a unique glimpse into a business or engineeringcareer, professional development and leadership courses, as well as one-on-one mentorship designed to further support professional growth.

Of course, we realize that growing future leaders in engineering and business doesn't just start with college students. For this reason, we partner with the LEAD programs in both businessand engineering to encourage outstanding high school students to pursue careers in these fields. This year, all four LEAD Summer Engineering Institute participants had the opportunity to tour a local Google office to attend technical talks and interact with Google engineers (okay, with some tasty food and video games thrown in as well).

If one or more of these opportunities sounds like something you'd like to participate in, you can find applications for full time opportunities and summer internship opportunities on ourstudent job site. Visit our scholarship page for more information on our scholarship opportunities. And follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates on application deadlines and new program announcements.

Google Chrome is a web browser designed to load web pages and web applications at lightning speed. Whether it's searching directly and quickly from the browser's address bar when you need to do some intensive research, or getting to the websites you rely on quickly at the click of the mouse, Google Chrome is just fast. Google Chrome celebrated its first birthday just over a month ago with a brand new stable release, which means even more speed improvements, as well as a fresh redesign of some of its most loved features.

More recently, we introduced Artist Themes for Google Chrome. We invited leading artists, architects, musicians, illustrators, filmmakers and fashion and interior designers from across the globe to create artwork for an unusual canvas: the modern web browser. Since then, we've enjoyed hearing thoughts from our users on these designs and how they've used them to personalize the browser. We've also been intrigued by the ways in which these themes have had interesting and unusual cultural resonance with people around the world.

To continue celebrating this collaboration of engineering and art, we've collaborated with our friends at YouTube to launch a new video (with a surprise ending) that we hope showcases the full beauty of these themes. Check it out at youtube.com/googlechromethemes or click the image below. And if you haven't tried Google Chrome recently, download the latest version and give it a whirl.

This Sunday, October 25th @ 8:30 p.m. (PDT) tune in to see the world's biggest band performing on the world's largest stage. YouTube and U2 have joined forces to live stream U2's performance this Sunday at The Rose Bowl Stadium.

Available internationally in the following countries: US, UK, France, Canada, Italy, Spain, Japan, Brazil, Australia, NZ, Ireland, Mexico, India, Israel, South Korea, and Netherlands. It's happening "With or Without You" and it's an experience you wont want to miss.

In case you didn't see our announcement yesterday, Google is partnering with Virgin America to provide free WiFi on every Virgin America flight between November 10, 2009 and January 15, 2010. Travel can be hectic during the holidays, so at least this way you can spend your time in the air staying connected to friends and family or getting some last-minute cramming in for your Chem final.

You can find out more about our partnership, where Virgin America flies and how the in-flight WiFi service works at www.freeholidaywifi.com.

From the comfort of your own dorm room, Street View on Google Maps lets you scope out a restaurant before heading out there for a date (oh look, there's a flower shop next door) or preview your spring break hotel to be sure it meets your strict requirements (oh look, the beach is right across the street). But wouldn't it be nice if you could see more places in Street View? Places like hiking or biking trails, sports stadiums, and maybe even your university campus!

Freshmen could easily study what all the campus buildings look like, and your family could get a better sense of your new home. Think back to when you were applying to schools - wouldn't it have been handy to be able to virtually tour college campuses? Or better yet, picture how nice a Street View walk down memory lane will be after you graduate and start to feels pangs of nostalgia for college life.

Good news: you can now nominate your campus to be photographed for Street View on Google Maps. We've created the Street View trike, a mechanical masterpiece made of 3 bicycle wheels and a mounted Street View camera, to take pictures of places like university campuses that cannot be reached by car. Visit www.google.com/triketo nominate your school for a visit from the Street View trike.

To get an idea of what Street View pictures taken by the trike look like, you can check out San Diego State University, the first university included in Google Maps:

So far we've taken the trike to a few other campuses, including the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, but all of you have a chance to nominate your school to be included next. Of course, we'll make sure to work directly with the administration at your school to get the necessary permissions and approvals before coming on campus - and, as with all Street View imagery, we'll blur identifiable faces.

We're also accepting nominations in 5 other categories for where to send the Street View trike next:

Parks & Trails

Pedestrian Malls (e.g., outdoor shopping areas, boardwalks)

Theme Parks & Zoos

Landmarks

Sports Venues (e.g., golf courses, racing tracks, stadium grounds)

Head to www.google.com/trike by October 28 to submit your nomination. After we comb through the submissions and pick out the finalists, you will have the opportunity to vote on a winner from each category for the Street View trike to visit. May the best campus win!

Today – October 15 – is known as Blog Action Day, an annual event that unites bloggers across the globe by posting about the same topic on the same day to help bring awareness to a certain issue. This year, the discussion is about Climate Change and we hope you'll check out the Official Google Blog to learn more about some of the steps we take as a company to address this important issue.

If you have blogs of your own, we also encourage you to post your own thoughts about the climate crisis and maybe some of the steps you're taking to contribute to change.

Ever found yourself being an armchair tourist looking at 3D buildings of your home town in Google Earth? Have you ever wanted to highlight that famous building in your city or on your campus, but not really been sure where to start?

Building Maker helps you put buildings on the 3D map.

Today we launched Google Building Maker, a fun and simple (and crazy addictive, it turns out) online tool for creating buildings for Google Earth. Basically, you pick a building and construct a model of it using aerial photos and simple 3D shapes – both of which we provide.When you're done, we take a look at your model. If it looks right, and if a better model doesn't already exist, we add it to the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth.

Check out this video to see Building Maker in action:

For now, you can choose to make buildings in any of about 50 cities. We'll keep adding more cities, but don't feel left out if we don't have your hometown yet — modeling in a place you've never been is a fantastic way to discover more about it.

Simply, make sure you have the latest version of Google Earth installed on your computer. If you're on a Mac, you will need to download the Google Earth plug-in directly.

[From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to have Stephen Savage join us here again. Stephen is Arizona State University's Geo-Archaeological Information Applications Lab IT Manager of the Archaeological Research Institute at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. You might remember his previous posts about Exploring exploplanets using Google Earth's APIor his work on the Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land.]

For years, astronauts and rocket scientists at NASA and JPL have had all the fun. Billions of people on Earth have seen pictures of Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt driving their "dune buggy" on the Moon. Billions more have seen pictures of NASA's Mars landers, Spirit and Opportunity. We've all wished we could be the ones to take these incredible toys out for a spin on the Red Planet or the Moon.

Now, thanks to Google, you can do the next best thing -- you can drive a virtual rover model on Google's Mars or Moon (or a skateboard on Earth), and experience the real topography of these places. We at ASU developed a "Drive the Solar System" website where you can explore how the power of Google Mars, Google Moon and Google Earth has been brought to the web. You can put your rover or skateboard down anyplace on Mars, the Moon or Earth and drive it anywhere you want to go. Explore the Apollo landing sites or Olympus Mons, the largest volcanic cone in the solar system. Drive down the Valles Marinaris, the canyon on Mars that dwarfs Arizona's Grand Canyon, or kick-flip your skateboard down the Amazon. And that's not all. You can visit all the other planets and the largest moons in the Solar System too.

But you can do more than drive or look at these strange new worlds -- you can also look at these places in depth with detailed information about each place you can visit included.

Google AISES scholars will each receive a USD $10,000 academic scholarship for the 2009-2010 academic year and are invited to attend the annual Google Scholars' Retreat at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California in 2010. The retreat is a time for Google to recognize the students’hard work and achievements, and to provide the scholars with an opportunity to meet computingprofessionals and network with other scholars. We hope this program will encourage students to continue to achieve great things in their studies and inspire them to become role models and leaders in science and technology.

We are relaunching our Googlers Beta Series and bringing you the unique stories and experiences of Google interns. Our first post for the season comes from Asit Mishra, a Google Summer Intern and PhD student from Penn State University, who will share with you his experience as a Software Engineer (SWE) Intern in our Seattle office.

Asit's Story:

Think about the 100+ tools that Google has launched, the billions who query our search engine everyday, and the 10,000+ crazy (in a good way) software engineers working at Google; there is a plethora of jobs that our server platform machines must serve each day. Our machines serve a diverse set of workloads, and managing and making sense of these workloads is a big challenge. But learning the behavior of these workloads can help us, among many other things, to make better scheduling decisions, to better project our machine growth, and to customize our cells to handle thejobs better. During my internship, I worked on a very interesting, and in my opinion, high-impact project where I modeled the workload of Google's machines.

I used a variety of tools, including time-series modeling, clustering and statistical methods to capture the workload signatures. After months of brainstorming with my mentor (Joseph Hellerstein) and the cluster management team, I was at a point where I could categorize the workloads into smaller groups. This gave us an opportunity to investigate the workload behavior at a macro-level and makes the analysis simpler.

Aside from the free food, massages and the rock-band set-up, I found the "Google-culture" to be really amazing. It is not very different from the culture one would see at a university or research lab. The openness and the helping attitude of Googlers, here, helped me a lot in my work. Between the numerous brainstorming sessions with my mentor and the cluster management team and the two trips down to Mountain View to dig-deep into our findings, these experiences have gone a long way in shaping the outcome of my project and enhancing my overall understanding of Computer Science. For me, it's been one of the most productive and enriching experiences within a 3-month span.

I had never seen terabytes worth of data before coming here! Once, my mentor told me that here at Google people don't worry about storing megabytes or gigabytes of data; if it's terabytes it a slight concern and if it's petabytes - that's where you actually start thinking.

A note from Joseph Hellerstein, Asit's host: We had great fun with Asit during the summer, and it was very productive. Asit's work is impacting how Google does cluster scheduling and capacity planning. Also, we submitted a paper to ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review. Oh, and we got some really cool jackets for our work with the Google Cluster Management Team.

The international version now includes a drop-down menu to filter content based on language of choice. For example, select French and find content from HEC in Paris and also the French-Canadian University of Montreal, or set to 'All' to browse videos in all languages. The Directory also enables subjects to be browsed - e.g. select 'Business', 'Engineering' or 'Literature' to see content available. Although this feature is currently only available for English at the moment, we are looking to roll-out to languages as more universities join.

Students, educators and fans of SketchUp, rejoice: we just released Google SketchUp Pro 7.1! This new version is available as a free upgrade to your existing student, instructor or lab license. If you're new to SketchUp 3D modeling software, Google offers great pricing for the education community. Students pay just $49 for a year-long Pro license, lab licenses are between $15-$30 per seat, depending whether you choose a 1, 2 or 3 year license; and, instructors can get themselves a Pro license at no charge. Learn more on our Education program on the SketchUp website.

SketchUp Pro 7.1 has been our most quickly adopted update because it adds a bunch of new features while providing enhanced performance and fixes for a lot of known issues. Of particular interest for Education is the new feature called Get Photo Texture, which allows you to quickly model buildings using Google Maps Street View imagery.

A popular K-12 activity guides students through the process of modeling a local building (such as their school building) using Google Earth and Google SketchUp. With the release of 7.1, the activity gets even more compelling because students can immediately access Street View imagery to apply to their model. Students can also access and edit existing buildings in the Google 3D Warehouse using the new "Nearby Buildings" feature.

For industrial design, mechanical design and architecture/landscape courses, LayOut 2.1 is bundled with the release. LayOut 2.1 improves on its rich 2D presentation features by adding Dimensioning. Now any of models can be annotated or dimensioned directly in LayOut without having to go back to the original model. Scaled printing, simple construction documentation, woodworking and even site planning is a snap. That's right, you heard the pun, the new dimensioning allows you to snap and measure from points in the embedded model!

All users will see faster performance when it comes to large, complex or heavily textured models. Google SketchUp Pro 7.1 continues the tradition of SketchUp's rich feature set, intuitive interface and our commitment to offering great pricing for Educators and Students. Learn more on our SketchUp website for Education.